BJMA EAST COAST

Saturday training was hot but fun and will definatley be part of our normal training for 2009. Spent a couple of hours on Saturday morning rolling with Brian, Eddie and Sam. Eddie commented how much harder it is wrestling with someone heavier, not too sure if he meant that in a nice way. Unfortunately I got suckered into a basic guard arm bar, I lost focus or more to the point became overly focussed on what I was doing and forgot that Brian was involved in the roll as well and he might just be trying to submit me.

This led me to remember back to several street confrontations I was involved with many years ago. The first one happened when I was about 13 years old and I was stopped from leaving the toilets from the local cinema. Two older teenagers had decided they would have some fun with me by not letting me leave and when I resisted one of them threw a fairly average right punch. I reacted with a straight left jab (I was training in boxing at the time) followed by a right and then numerous more punches until he hit the ground with me on top. When the fight started it felt like I was standing in a narrow hallway and my attackers face seemed to be the only thing I could see. It was only after I was pushed off the guy on the ground and my mate was holding me that I started to regain the vision of where I was.

The second time was when I was working as the security manager at a local nightclub and I guy turned up with a baseball bat and large knife. I engaged the man using a cue stick as a way of disarming him. Initially I was very aware of the 100 or so patrons that were standing around but when he lunged I flicked the switch in my head and it was one with my main focus being to get rid of the knife,

Now both of these were under extremely stressful situation and because of this tunnel visiong occurred. Saturday’s rolling session wasn’t stressful and this led me to believe that it wasn’t tunnel vision. I believe it had more to do with my working memory. I will belooking at working memory along with many other learning parameters in future posts.

Stay Tuned

Brad